Douglas Crockford has been removed as a keynote speaker at the Nodevember conference due to making other speakers feel uncomfortable.
I can certainly imagine myself to be drawn to a conference where Douglas Crockford was speaking (in fact, I'd be likely to attend if he were the only speaker), but having "lightly googled" the other two I'm not sure their contributions to the community would be enough to draw me in to the talk.
Which is fine I guess. My opinion is worth what it cost and the conference organisers can do what they want.
I really hope this doesn't blow up into some sort of "DongleGate" or anything of the sort. I just don't fucking care and would very much prefer it if every interesting headline wasn't drowned out for the next two weeks by "My opinion on Crockford-gate"
I don't want to read about the visceral stalking reaction that the above people got in response to their SJW-ing, or how SJW-ists are ruining the world. I don't wnat to hear about how "we can do better" by not uttering threats to people who don't want to hang out with Crockford. A don't want them to be threatened.... none of the anything that happens every time any of these issues poke their head up.
I'd love it if we could all just say "OK" and move on.
I'll keep an eye out for a conference that will invite Crockford, I'll skip Nodevember (which being in tenessee I wasn't going to anyways, but the same theory applies to this stuff when it is in Toronto).
Anyways - obviously I'm already getting a bit "ranty" which I don't mean to but we've all seen this "outrage" thing so many times now. Are we smarter than the same old song and dance yet? Live and let live. They can uninvite him, the people who disagree can not go.
Everyone is happy and who knows? Maybe Crockford (if he cares) decides to moderate his behavior. Maybe he doesn't care. Up to him.
#2 is someone saying "me neither, because these reasons"
I guess we could consider it "a woozle" but it does boil down to two people who have publicly stated they don't like Crockford.
If I examine their relative contributions to JavaScript it does appear to be metaphorically like the deckhand on the Santa Maria refusing to share the conference stage with Galileo, or "Storm trooper #3" being fed up with Mark Hamill.
But maybe they're people who have specifically contributed to nodevember. I mean, one of them has been on the hansel-minutes podcast.
One of the complainants is from Austin tx, and the others list San Francisco. Which are both pretty far from Nashville.
Anyways, I'm not sure any of that matters, it looks a little like a case of long distance bullying against someone who the conference attendees likely could learn something from, by people from whom, I think they couldn't.
I mean, as professional programmers, we all know a few bright ones who have some aspects of socially awkward. We all know at least one grumpy old man (some of us are him!).
It really seems to me like a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water, but I didn't care about nodevember yesterday and I don't today. I would definitely go to a Crockford talk though.
I disagree with the decision to remove him as a speaker. Privately I'm annoyed, frustrated, angry, worried about things like the authoritarianism of it all. But ultimately, I respect nodevember's freedom to make their conference the way they want it.
We can all move on from this one I think.